The Fourth
Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference
(ArabicNLP 2026) 

Conference Description 

The Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference (ArabicNLP 2026) is organized by the ACL Special Interest Group on Arabic NLP (SIGARAB). ArabicNLP 2025 follows the First ArabicNLP conference (in 2023 with EMNLP), the Second ArabicNLP conference (in 2024 with ACL), the third ArabicNLP conference (in 2025  with EMNLP), and seven previous workshop editions (as WANLP), which have been very successful drawing in a large active participation in various capacities (See ArabicNLP Scholar).

The research focus of ArabicNLP is, naturally, Arabic, a collection of language varieties, from Classical to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), and including many living and historical Arabic dialects.  Arabic poses many challenges for the field of computational linguistics, including rich morphology, orthographic ambiguity as well as the wide variety of understudied dialects.

Arabic is one of the official languages of the United Nations and the native tongue of over 473 million native speakers living in a region of geopolitical significance. All these factors combined make Arabic an attractive object of study from a computational perspective. The fast growth of Arabic on the Internet over the past few years and the vibrant use of Arabic dialects on social media, including issues of global relevance, lend the proposed conference particular and timely significance. The opportunities that are made possible by working on Arabic, both standard and dialects, cannot be underestimated in their consequence on the Arab world, the Mediterranean region, and the rest of the world, let alone on the advancement of computational linguistics methods and techniques to address significant inherent linguistic complexities.

We invite submissions on topics that include but are not limited to, the following:

§  Core Arabic NLP: methods for MSA and/or dialects, including segmentation/tokenization, morphological and morphosyntactic analysis/disambiguation, POS tagging, named entity recognition, chunking, parsing, semantic role labeling, text classification (e.g., sentiment analysis, offensiveness/hate speech), etc.

§   Machine learning for Arabic: theory, modeling, and systems for generative and discriminative approaches, including domain adaptation, transfer learning, multilingual/multidialectal learning, and evaluation methodology.

§   Arabic Large Language Models: pretraining, instruction tuning, alignment, benchmarking, robustness, fairness, and culturally grounded evaluation, etc.

§   Applications: machine translation, summarization, dialogue, creative generation/ analysis, ASR and TTS, OCR, educational and assistive technologies, and social media analytics.

§   Resources and infrastructure: corpora, lexicons/dictionaries, annotations and guidelines, benchmarks, and tools to support Arabic NLP research and deployment.

Submissions must have a clear focus on specific issues pertaining to the Arabic language whether it is standard Arabic, dialectal, or mixed. Papers on other languages sharing problems faced by Arabic NLP researchers such as Semitic languages or languages using Arabic script are welcome. Papers on generalized efforts using Arabic resources but targeting other languages are also welcome. Descriptions of commercial systems are welcome, but authors should be willing to discuss the details of their work. We accept long, short, and demo paper submissions.

Tagline: ArabicNLP 2026 presents the latest advancements in Arabic natural language processing research, resources, techniques, and applications.

Invited Speakers

Nizar Habash (NYUAD) has welcomed being the keynote speaker of the conference.

Workshop Size / Prior Events

Estimated Number of Attendees: 75-100 in-person and 50-75 virtually. In ArabicNLP 2025, the conference received 170 people registrations. 

We also managed to secure financial sponsorships to support virtual student attendance in the past.

Previous Editions: Below are the details of the previous editions leading to this proposal.

§ 3rd ArabicNLP @ EMNLP 2025, Suzhou, China: Main conference: 95 submissions, 39 accepted (41\%).  Shared tasks: 11 overview papers, 127 system papers. 

§ 2nd ArabicNLP @ ACL 2024, Thailand: Main conference: 68 submissions, 31 accepted (42.6%). Shared tasks: 8 overview papers, 71 system papers.

§ 1st ArabicNLP @ EMNLP 2023, Singapore: Main conference: 80 submissions, 38 accepted (47%). Shared tasks: 5 overview papers, 48 system papers.

§ 7th WANLP @ EMNLP 2022, Abu Dhabi, UAE: 68 submissions, 36 accepted (52%), and 28 Shared Task system descriptions.

§ 6th WANLP @ EACL 2021, Online: 43 submissions, 29 accepted (67%), and 24 Shared Task system descriptions.

§ 5th WANLP @ COLING 2020, Online: 42 submissions, 3 withdrawn, 20 accepted (51%), and 15 Shared Task system descriptions.

§ 4th WANLP @ ACL 2019 in Florence, Italy: 45 submissions; 22 were accepted (49%), and 17 Shared Task system descriptions.

§ 3rd WANLP @ EACL 2017 in Valencia, Spain: 47 submissions; 22 accepted (47%).

§ 2nd WANLP @ ACL 2015 in Beijing, China: 23 submissions; 15 accepted (65%), and 8 Shared Task system descriptions.

§ 1st WANLP  @ EMNLP 2014 in Doha, Qatar: 40 submissions; 20 accepted (50%), and 9 Shared Task system descriptions.

Virtual Mode: We expect ArabicNLP 2026 to be a hybrid event. There will be a mix of in-person and hybrid presenters for talks and posters. We will ask the speakers to record their presentations ahead of time and share them with the organizers.

Shared Tasks

The call for shared tasks will be here.

We typically host shared tasks to engage the community. The organizing committee will make a call for shared tasks on Arabic NLP if accepted and select the best proposals.  In ArabicNLP 2025, we hosted eleven shared tasks and received 127 system papers.  

Organizers

Conference Organizers page.